The Sin of Empathy Part III: Dehumanization is the Goal
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In this final installment of the series, Brad discusses the concept of 'toxic empathy' as introduced by Ali Beth Stuckey in her book and critiques its impact on empathy within Christian and nationalistic contexts. He explores how empathy is being demonized by figures such as Elon Musk and Joe Rigney, and addresses the broader implications of reducing empathy in society, particularly towards marginalized groups. The episode also highlights the importance of critical thinking and the humanities in fostering a more empathetic and understanding society.
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Axis Moondi You will never hear Ali Beth Stuckey on NPR.
We are talking about Toxic Empathy, her fantastic new book.
This form of empathy, feeling what someone feels to the point of being blind to reality, is really tripping a lot of Christians up.
And it's making us perpetuate false narratives that really harm people.
That's what I'm trying to do to show you how this looks in the real world.
Any empathy that leads you to affirm sin, to tell a lie, or to support a policy that is destructive, especially one that is against the created order, is no longer empathy, it's toxic empathy.
Music by Ben Thede.
What's up y'all?
Brad here.
I want to say thank you for joining me on this fine Monday and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Today is my final installment of the sin of empathy and reflection on what empathy is, why it's being demonized in our current moment, and how we might think about it differently.
I want to say that coming this week we have not only It's in the Code and the Weekly Roundup, but on Thursday we are debuting Red State Religions, a new series by Dr. Gillian Frank.
On religious communities, fighting for progressive issues in some of the most conservative parts of the country.
Folks who are fighting for marriage equality, gender affirming care, voting rights, and reproductive rights, all in places like Mississippi, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.
Check that out, and it tells a different story about American religion and the ways religious people are fighting for justice.
If you've been following along, you know the last two weeks I've been talking about empathy and I've been talking about Elon Musk who says that empathy is a bug in Western civilization.
And Joe Rigney, a pastor who wrote a book called The Sin of Empathy.
I've been going through Rigney's book and dissecting it theologically and philosophically, psychologically and so on.
I've been discussing the ways that it really is aimed at women, aimed at racial minorities, aimed at those who call for justice inside of churches.
I want to talk today about a kind of different question.
Why would you not want people to be empathetic?
What does that do?
And then secondly, what are the results of us turning off our empathy switch?
If we don't use the muscle of empathy, if it atrophies in our individual and collective lives, what is the kind of result that we are going to get from that exercise or lack of exercise?
And that's what I really want to get into today.
I want to get into that by talking about the ways that people who are Christian nationalists and fundamentalists think about this.
And then I also want to talk about it in connection to White nationalists and totalitarian regimes.
So let's try to connect some dots.
You ready?
There's another book about empathy from a Christian perspective that vilifies it.
It's not just Joe Rigney.
He is not alone.
The book is called Toxic Empathy and it's by Allie Beth Stuckey and it was a New York Times bestseller.
And so Joe Rigney has been mainstreamed.
He's appeared on Al Mohler's podcast.
He's definitely getting a lot of play.
But Allie Beth Stuckey also.
This book made a lot of waves, and especially for women, was a kind of really important book.
Allie is a woman and talks about the ways that empathy, she thinks, is actually a bad thing.
But my argument is that the media, progressive activists, will use someone's natural inclination towards empathy.
Meaning, I put myself in someone else's shoes and I feel what they feel.
I see what they see.
Two, convince the person that the only compassionate and righteous position on a particular subject is the progressive one.
So I can give an example of what that looks like just so people understand what this means concretely.
We go through in the book five subjects in which I see this used most prominently.
That is abortion, that's gender, so-called gender identity, that is sexuality in the definition of marriage, that's immigration, and that's what's typically referred to as social justice.
Let me focus some brief reflection on a post she made in late 2024 on X. Formerly known as Twitter.
She says this.
This is what toxic empathy gets us.
Sex change surgeries for violent criminals.
It urges us to feel the feelings of a particular quote victim while ignoring those on the other side of the moral equation.
Empathy for the desperate pregnant woman at the expense of her unborn child.
Empathy for the gender confused man At the expense of women and girls.
Empathy for the LGBTQ person at the expense of children.
Empathy for the illegal alien at the expense of citizens.
Empathy for the criminal at the expense of the innocent.
I'm going to come back to this really messed up set of beatitudes in a minute.
But as I proceed today, I want you to link a couple of things.
I want you to link the idea that if you turn off empathy, You're able to dehumanize.
If you get people to turn off their empathy sensors, you're able to get them to think in black and white.
And if you can do that, you can justify the mistreatment of entire groups of people, people who are searching for a different way of life or a different mode of existing in the world that doesn't fit certain normative structures.
You can get Yourself, you can get a group, you can get the herd, you can get the masses to see people as less than human.
That is what empathy does.
And if you can do that, you can get to a place where cruelty, exclusion, violence is not bad, but justified.
Now, that is connected, and here's one more step, to a disdain for critical thinking, And the humanities.
And that may feel like it's coming out of left field, but I'll try to explain in a second.
Let's go back to Allie Beth Stuckey.
She gives us this really messed up set of beatitudes.
And they're based on, like, really weird, unfounded dichotomies.
Empathy for the gender confused man at the expense of women and girls.
Now let's just take the premise of this statement.
The premise is, That if you are empathetic toward a man who is assigned the male sex at birth, who is expected to be a man who performs the gender in the traditional ways,
in the expected ways, if you have empathy for that person who's experiencing gender dysphoria, who says, I was assigned the male sex at birth, I'm expected to be a man, but I don't think that aligns with my experience.
If you empathize with them, it's at the expense of women and girls.
You're hurting women and girls by doing that.
Somehow, empathy for this one leads to hurt for that one.
Empathy for the LGBTQ person at the expense of children.
Now, this is just straight up queer phobia.
This is just straight up based on the idea that LGBTQ people, by existing, Her children, whether that's because of their identity or because they're groomers and perverts and whatever else.
Empathy for the illegal alien at the expense of citizens.
Okay, so this is based on like black and white thinking binary thinking and says if somebody comes to the country and is undocumented that automatically hurts the citizens.
Does not take into account any any of the data Or any of the idea that says, well, actually undocumented immigrants provide billions of dollars of workforce labor in the United States, often in jobs other people don't want to do.
They pay billions and billions and billions of dollars in taxes.
They, they do all kinds of things that actually contribute mightily to the society.
So if you're just going to assume that the undocumented immigrant hurt citizens, it's not based on data.
It's just based on your belief and what amounts to xenophobia.
Now, there's more I can say, but let's just stick with those.
So we have these prohibitions against empathy for certain people.
And the idea is this, that if you empathize with them, you hurt those.
Right? It's kind of like an equation that's very basic.
Empathize here, subtract, therefore take from the other side of the equation.
And I'm going to come back to this at the end.
If you want people to think this way, you have to get them away from the humanities and critical thinking.
You have to get them away from books.
You have to get them away from disciplines like philosophy and English and all the other ways that we exercise the ability to handle complexity and to see various points of view at once, to balance the stakeholders, to balance the registers of power in any Community, or society, or relationship.
To think through the best ways to move forward in light of those things.
You have to get people to accept it's one or the other.
It's this or that.
Okay? So that's number one.
But number two, I think you have to say, from the very beginning, and I think this is where Ali Besteki is coming from, along with Joe Rigney.
That if you empathize with those people you're doing something wrong because they don't deserve it and it's dangerous because seeing the world from their point of view is seeing the world incorrectly.
Like if you are empathetic with the woman who is pregnant, two weeks pregnant, six weeks pregnant, ten weeks pregnant, whatever, considering Terminating the pregnancy.
If you empathize with that person and you listen to her story about her pregnancy and her life, if you listen to things beyond the idea that abortion is always murder, right?
Again, here's the black and white thinking.
Abortion is always murder.
So if you do abortion, it's murder, right?
It's one or the other.
If you think beyond the fact that a six week pregnancy is the termination of a fetus, that In so many ways is different from what we would call a human being in normal circumstances.
If you have empathy for the LGBTQ person and you start to realize that somebody was born.
They identify as a man.
They are attracted to men.
They didn't choose that.
It's not something they wanted to do to make mom or dad or society or church or God mad.
It's just who they are.
If you start to accept that that's A part of their identity, not a lifestyle.
You're going to see it wrongly.
You're going to see it wrong.
And this is what Ali Bestaki comes back to throughout her book.
You're not going to see it according to God's ways.
You're going to see it according to their ways.
If you have empathy for the illegal alien, she calls them, the undocumented person, somebody who came here from Venezuela, escaping violence.
Someone is coming here, escaping threat or famine.
Or war.
Whatever may be.
Somebody who has walked a thousand miles with a tiny child, braving natural danger, braving the vulnerability of being a person without a country.
If you empathize with them, if you see the world as like, wow, that seems like a mom just trying to get her kids to a place where they can live safely, not be under threat.
Not be killed by a cartel or gang violence and simply have a life that's full of basic things like safe place to sleep, food, shelter, a chance at education and maybe some health, health care when they need it.
If you start to see it through their eyes, you're gonna see it wrong.
The same goes for Elon Musk when he says the fundamental bug of Western civilization is empathy.
I think you can trace some steps there.
I think what he's saying is that one of the fundamental bugs of Western civilization is seeing every person as having the same worth and dignity and rights.
That the fundamental problem with Western civilization is its egalitarianism.
That the idea that every human being, regardless of their class, their status, their lineage, Their race, their ethnicity, their genetics.
It doesn't matter who you are.
You have the same rights, the same dignity, the same worth.
No matter how much money, no matter where you were born.
Now, think about that story.
Okay? Think about what I just said as a story.
Okay? Think about human rights, the inalienable rights that we hear about in our founding documents.
It's a story.
It's a story that says every human, No matter who they are, has the same worth, dignity, and therefore the same right to pursue happiness.
If you grant that story, if you believe that story, then empathy is built in.
Why? Because empathy is saying, well, here's the story that I have about every human being.
We're all fundamentally Have the same dignity, the same worth, the same rights.
So if I am a rich person living in Beverly Hills, California, and I hear about a Venezuelan migrant who is brown, who does not speak my language, crossing the border,
there's a chance that according to the story I just rehearsed, that the The exercise of empathy would be an exercise that says, well, all human beings, regardless of status, economics, ethnicity, race, gender, they all have the same rights and dignity.
Most of us.
And so it's possible for me to try to think myself into their viewpoint, to see what is driving them.
To do something like migrate all the way from Venezuela to the United States.
It's possible for me to try to do an exercise where I would consider their motivation.
The pressure points that would put them on a journey of a thousand miles in order to live in a place they've never been with no resources and no real chances to be, you know, thriving and accepted in a very automatic short-term manner.
What would drive them to that?
When I start asking myself, I might say, well, danger.
Need. Lack of resources.
Lack of safety.
And then I might say, well, that makes sense.
Yeah, kind of makes sense.
And then I'd have to, like, take some other steps.
Well, all right, what should we do?
Because how many people are going to come across the border?
How many people are going to approach?
Should we have a system to put in place?
How do we handle that?
What does this mean for our economy?
What does this mean for our school system?
How do we have...
those are decisions that we have to go through.
But we would start from a place where like no person's illegal, no per...
right? Every person is just born with the same rights, dignity and worth.
We all have value, the same value.
Even if some of us have more money, some of us have different Color, skin, whatever, the very basics.
The story of Western civilization, at least in what I think Elon Musk is referring to, the story has never been lived out in full and you don't have to email me, I know.
But the story is that we have a democratic way of life.
We all get a vote because we all have the same inalienable rights, because we all have the same worth and value.
It's a story about humanity we're telling.
So when Elon Musk says, The fundamental bug of Western civilization is empathy.
That's connected to other comments he's made about people who are in the parasitic class.
If you dig into Musk, if you dig into Peter Thiel, if you dig into Marc Andreessen, if you dig into Curtis Yarvin, all of these tech magnates, they see most people as belonging to a different class than them.
A parasitic class, a lower class.
Yarvin has joked that People of the masses, the masses of humanity should be used as fuel for a kind of biodiesel.
Their bodies should be used for fuel.
Curtis Jarvin is someone that the vice president quotes on a regular basis.
Jarvin is someone that the vice president is a member of the United States.
Those folks do not buy, they do not adopt the story.
That we all have the same rights, value, dignity and worth.
They don't believe that.
And therefore they don't believe in empathy.
Because empathy would mean that I, the billionaire, would have to think myself into the shoes of the Venezuelan migrant and I might start to see it from their viewpoint.
I might start to see the how and the why pushing them to do what they're doing.
I might start to see that if I was in their shoes, I wouldn't like that either.
It's like the most basic preschool logic there is.
If that were you, would you like that?
If that were you, how would you behave?
If that were you, what would you do differently?
Empathy is the practice of thinking yourself into the place of, how would I feel if this were me?
This is a point Where the Christian nationalists like Stuckey and Rigney and the technocrats like Musk and Thiel and Yarver overlap.
Because both of them want you to think that the story that every human has the same dignity, worth and rights is not correct.
Now, how does this go back to the Christian nationalists?
And you're like, Brad, they're not good.
They don't think that.
Oh, they think everyone was created by God.
Like, come on.
Of course, they think that.
We all have the same worth.
Like, we're all God's children, right?
I mean, that doesn't make sense theologically.
Come on, Mr. Theologian.
Like, I thought you were gonna, like, make sense of this.
But this does make sense if you think about the doctrine of original sin.
The doctrine of original sin says that every human being is fallen.
Every human being is sinful.
If you talk to certain Christians, they will say that as soon as a baby's born, they are condemned to hell.
They are worthy of condemnation for eternity by dint of original sin.
You could be six months old, you could be six minutes old, you could be six years old.
You are deserving of God's wrath.
So, now hang with me.
So, if as a two-year-old, a twelve-year-old, an eighteen-year-old, you are a fallen, condemnable being.
That there is a good chance that seeing things through your eyes, feeling the way that you might feel, understanding your perspective is going to be to enter into the body, the skin, the experience of somebody who is led astray by their fallen nature and the temptations of the devil rather than God.
So it is up to us, those who are born again in Christ, walking in his righteousness, and who have the armor of God to protect us from our flesh, to make sure we don't think ourselves into their experience and don't allow ourselves to be tempted by it.
Is that saying they're less human than me?
Maybe not.
But think about the function.
The function is saying, I'm born again into a new humanity.
Romans 5?
The redemption of Christ has made me new.
I'm different than you.
I've been born into a new way.
I'm a different kind than you.
Think about that language.
If that's true, if I'm a different kind than you, don't I sound like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel?
I'm a different kind than you.
I'm smarter.
I'm technologically advanced.
I'm evolutionarily beyond.
That's what Yarvin and Thiel and Musk think.
If I am different than you, I'm not adopting that story that all humans are equal.
And I'm doing something wrong or damaging if I think myself into your shoes through the exercise of empathy.
I'm doing something I shouldn't do because either you're less or inferior than me, a la Musk, Or, you're evil, condemnable and sinful a la Original Sin.
Now, what does that do?
Well, what it does is it changes the story that we're telling about certain people.
Ali Bestaki says in her Messed Up Beatitudes, That if you have empathy for the undocumented immigrant, then you don't take into account the citizen.
If you have empathy for the LGBTQ person, you don't take into account children.
If you have empathy for the trans woman who is assigned male sex at birth, you don't have empathy for women and girls.
What you're saying Is that those people are different.
They're evil.
They're less than.
And if you have empathy for them, you're doing something wrong.
So what's the next step?
Well, the next step is dehumanization.
And I think most of you listening have probably heard someone at some point say that a lack of empathy leads to dehumanization.
There's a quote that goes around often that is attributed to Hannah Arendt about a civilization that lacks empathy Leading to barbarism.
And I haven't been able to find that quote in Hannah Arendt.
I'm sure some of you are Hannah Arendt scholars.
And if it is in her corpus, please email me.
I feel like I can't find it.
It's everywhere.
If you Google it, you'll find it in about a thousand places, whether I'm substats or blogs or Instagram posts or whatever.
But I can't find it actually in her book.
So I don't have the reference.
But the idea that you get barbarism as a lack of empathy, I think it holds, and I think it goes like this.
If I think certain people are in a parasitic class, well, if something bad happens to them, who cares?
If I think that the LGBTQ person is acting on their sinful fallen flesh and the temptations of the devil, and in fact, they're an agent of spiritual warfare, who's working on behalf of demonic forces that are actively trying to hurt or counter the people of God, then something bad happening to them might be good.
If you teach people that they shouldn't have empathy for others because certain others are other, you're giving a license for violence, for exclusion, For picking them up off the street and deporting them and saying we should all rejoice about that We should feel good about it.
We should be thankful for it One of the things that I have learned from Hannah Arendt is about the banality of evil And if you read that book and I've talked about it on this podcast in years past She's covering well a couple of things.
She's talking about The ways that evil is oftentimes routinized and that evil is is so much less about extraordinary supervillains who are able to reign over the earth and cause their irrevocable damage, which does happen and you know, don't get me wrong.
There are exceedingly evil people in the history of the United States and the human race the human species, whatever.
But evil is often about The everyday actions we have that turn a blind eye to the humanity of others.
That evil is going along procedurally and bureaucratically and according to process with the dehumanization of other people.
That evil is in essence saying, well, I can't put myself in their place and I won't.
I'm just going to stay in the system, do my job, Keep going about what's required of me.
Even if my job includes organizing death camps or assigning numbers and organizational identifiers to people headed to death camps.
Well, I'm just doing my job.
Okay. Have you stopped to think about the people affected by your job?
Nope, I haven't and I'm not going to.
I'm not going to think myself into their shoes.
I'm not going to empathize with them.
And I can do that if I'm convinced, as a Nazi Germany, that the Jews, and those with disabilities, and those who are homosexual, and so on, were less than human.
And I can do that.
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The term Bible Belt conjures images of old-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But what if I told you that the Bible Belt is more than holy rollers and holy judgment?
What if I told you that like any other belt, the Bible Belt is filled with holes that lead to unexpected places?
Where pastors and deacons and volunteer ministers demand equality and representation for gay couples, single moms, and anyone trying to get to the ballot box.
My name is Dr. Gillian Frank, and my new limited series podcast, Red State Religions, explores the persistence of liberal religious values and progressive politics in so-called red states by telling the stories of faith leaders, lay people, and congregations and how they put faith into action.
